This invention relates to the automated and integrated management of health, safety and environmental information as it pertains to the manufacture, use, handling, transport, and sales of chemical products.
The invention is useful in light of the widely regulated nature of these activities. Federal and State laws and regulations such as the Occupational Safety and Health Act (“OSHA”) have much to say about the information that must be gathered, maintained, stored, evaluated and distributed in chemical manufacturing. For example, the regulations require an employer to establish a written hazard communication plan to advise its employees of hazards associated with chemicals the employees handle, and incorporate into this plan the use of container labels, warning signs, Material Safety Data Sheets (“MSDSs”) and training programs. The centerpiece of the OSHA Hazard Communication Standard is the MSDS, required for each hazardous substance manufactured or used on the site. The MSDS includes all relevant information pertaining to a hazardous substance, from its ingredients to physical properties, health hazards, exposure limits, regulatory controls, storage incompatibilities, safe handling and use precautions and much more.
This and other legislation, with its demanding regulatory requirements, has created a need for sophisticated information management solutions to assist industry and other impacted entities in the compliance process. In recent years, software applications have emerged that attempt to manage selected aspects of compliance, such as dissemination of MSDS or Hazardous Waste Manifest information. Most solutions have been of a limited scope.
For example, the FLOW GEMINI program previously available from General Research provides hazardous substance report generation, using a blank screen on which the user designs the reporting forms to be used. Some standard report forms are included with this software.
SAP produces a software module that can be used to gather chemical data into a substance database and allows users to manually select phrases for MSDS construction. It does not involve an automated rule-driven process for generating hazard information about the materials.
Imagetrak Software's MSDS ExPress allows scanning of MSDS images, which are then attached in an unspecified way to a database record. Information contained on the scanned-in MSDSs can then be queried in a simple question and answer format.
OSHA-SOFT's Compliance Manager provides a link between MSDSs and chemical inventory information, to facilitate compliance with the OSHA Hazards Communication Standard.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,664,112 to Alternative Systems, Inc. proposes a hazard communication system containing some of the elements outlined above but includes and integrates modules for tracking waste spills and inventory as well as several other informational elements.
The systems of the prior art combine product information entered by a system user with document templates to create hazard communication documents. That is to say, MSDS authoring has largely been document-based. Data was compiled from a variety of sources and scanned or manually entered into forms or precursors of forms such as electronic document templates. Each time a data element changed, all of the documents based on the data needed to be called up and revised individually. In some cases this was done by directly associating product data with document data fields. In other cases it is done through a relational database which arrived at the same result indirectly. Prior art systems have not presented a means for decompiling information about a material, associating hazard information with the decompiled information, and then recompiling hazard communications based upon a systematic application of rules. Instead, the system user provided all of the data about each substance for which a document was to be prepared. No systemic means have heretofore been available to create and disseminate hazard data for components of substances or substances derived or related to them.